The present invention relates in general to communications systems and methods. More specifically, it relates to a system and method that enables the public to send and receive electronic mail and messages over the Internet with assurances of delivery, security, privacy, priority and manageability.
The Internet has produced a revolutionary change in the sharing of information. The growth in electronic, or “e” mail, over the Internet has been spectacularly robust, with similarly strong future expansion forecasted. Email use is exploding because of the proliferation of computing devices of various types, and because of the greater availability of, and access to, telecommunications bandwidth. An estimated 31 billion email messages were sent daily during 2002, and that number, increasing by more than 20% per year, is expected to exceed 60 billion per day in 2006.
However, this rapid increase in email has produced significant, and largely unanticipated, problems. While email is an easy and inexpensive way to send someone else a message or document, those same attributes have led to recipients receiving unexpectedly large, and increasing, quantities of email, both wanted and unwanted.
The explosion in wanted email is, by itself, causing an ever-increasing overload problem. Of the 31 billion total daily email messages in 2002, an estimated 21 billion per day were wanted emails, i.e., those recipients deem of value, whether solicited or unsolicited in nature. And, that volume of wanted email is expected to reach 36 billion per day in 2006.
Compounding this overload situation is the growing quantity of email that is both unwanted and unsolicited (and sometimes offensive). This increasing volume of nuisance email not only frustrates email recipients but also restricts and constrains the optimal development of the Internet email system. Other negative aspects of this nuisance email—such as reduced business efficiency, increased costs and expanded security risks—are well known. See, for example, the discussion of the negative effects of nuisance email in U.S. Pat. No. 6,321,261 to Donaldson.
As total email volume grows, the recipient's (and sender's) problem becomes analogous to a regular postal mail box that receives far more mail than it can hold. Without such meaningful priority differentiation, a recipient needs to perform a time-consuming review of all daily emails in order to find and review the most important. Often, the magnitude of this repetitive and wasteful task drives recipients to just delete all emails, thereby risking the loss of information which is important and thus has value to recipients and senders alike. This massive message problem of both overload and nuisance email has become so onerous that a better system and method of email document management is urgently required. And, until such a system and method is available, the commercial utility of the Internet will remain constrained for many current or potential users.
For example, one currently constrained area is that of legitimate email marketing—the electronic equivalent of conventional direct mail marketing. Direct mail marketing has been an accepted and effective way of advertising and promoting goods and services for many years, both to consumers and to businesses. Its electronic counterpart has the potential—as yet unrealized—to grow and develop similar levels of acceptability and commercial effectiveness.
Today, the largest share of online advertising is in the form of banner ads, not emails. Of the $2.8 billion spent in the U.S. in 1999 for online advertising, banner advertising accounted for 50%, with email accounting for only 3%. However, banner advertising is notoriously inefficient and plagued by low click-thru rates. Therefore, there is a need for more effective Internet marketing methods—like direct email marketing—to gain audience attention, convey messages, and increase rates of response.
Email not only has a larger base than the Worldwide Web, but email also has the capability to give audiences personalized, media-rich, interactive communication where, and when, they are most receptive—a capability which will elicit a much greater response than banner advertising. But, email marketing cannot reach its full potential unless there is a better way to manage the growing email volume and clutter. At present, the email highways have so much “noise” that it distracts recipients from giving sufficient attention to legitimate online email advertising. Today, it is difficult for a recipient to understand the importance, value and priority of a particular email until it is opened and reviewed. And, this opening and reviewing process is time consuming, and exposes the recipient to technical risks (such as viruses and worms) as well as content risk (such as offensive words and pictures). A constraint on email marketing now is the concern that the communicated messages will be confused with, or associated with, valueless nuisance email.
A corollary problem with the Internet mail system—in addition to both overload and nuisance email—is security. The email security process that now exists is inadequate and impedes expanded usage of the Internet for many potential commercial purposes. Many email applications have encryption procedures, but their procedures are too complex for many email users, or not reasonably and/or generally available in needed situations. As such, email security represents another problem looking for an effective solution.
A good example of the security issue is provided by the email security requirements of the U.S. Federal Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA). HIPAA has declared that emails (and faxes) which are not secured by encryption are unacceptable for communicating personal health care information (such as diagnosis codes, test results and certificates of medical necessity) among doctors, other health care providers, and insurance organizations. When this law went into effect in the United States in October 2003, many health care service firms still had no email systems which met the HIPAA requirements for communicating protected health care information. Technology is not readily available, or is not acceptably cost-effective for many health care providers. This situation continues today, unresolved.
For wanted email, there is currently no known solution to the email overload and priority differentiation problems described above.
For the unwanted, unsolicited, nuisance email portion of the problem, some vendors supply software filters that block and exclude emails using various rules applied to email subject lines, sender addresses, and some content of the email. This software can reside on a service provider's server or the user's computer system. These nuisance email blockers allow the customer varying capabilities to adjust the filter rules. The aforementioned '267 patent to Donaldson also discusses the various categories of known nuisance email control solutions as of 1999. The '267 patent itself describes an active probe filter with multiple layers of defense located in a conventional firewall configuration between a remote host and a local message transfer agent.
One recent example of such a software filter service is an Internet Service Provider (ISP) that uses a filter sold under the trade designation “Brightmail” within its email system. The filtering rules and software are controlled by the ISP, and the existence of this filter was even unknown to at least some of its customers when the filter was initially activated. Some, but not all, unsolicited email is blocked. Unfortunately, some unsolicited-and-wanted email is blocked, and some unsolicited-and-unwanted email still comes through. Even worse, some wanted (and solicited and expected emails) are also blocked, and a recipient does not know at the time that they have been blocked. To see if and what emails are being blocked, a customer must leave his email application, go to the ISP's website, enter a particular area of that website, log in with I.D. and password, and scroll through days and lines of emails. To unblock specific senders, a customer must email the sender's email address to the ISP, which is the only entity that can correct the filtering rules.
Included among the many drawbacks of these nuisance email filtering services and software are that they:                Block many wanted emails from reaching recipients. One information technology market research firm has estimated that this problem cost businesses $3.5 billion in 2003.        Allow many economically valueless, unwanted, unsolicited and offensive emails to reach recipients. And, these cost businesses an estimated $10 billion in 2003.        Do not filter or screen email for content risk by any general, public standard.        Do not universally screen email for technical risk.        Do not provide any publicly accepted priority or value indicators on emails so recipients can quickly see and automatically sort such higher priority emails from other lower priority email.        Do not provide any means to give incentives to recipients to open priority-designated email.        Do not provide for any integrated email tracking service for senders or recipients.        Do not offer any officially recognized notification of receipt or opening.        Do not offer any comprehensive security measures other than anti-virus screening.There are other vendors that offer email encryption services, but these services also are not part of a complete service package that addresses the above described email overload and nuisance email problems as well. In addition, most current email encryption and digital signature methods are complex for common email users, including those procedures that are part of current generally-available email applications.        Do not work in many cases easily and seamlessly from within the user's email application.        
One example of an organization that has sought to address these defects is the U.S. Postal Service (U.S.P.S.) itself. But, the U.S.P.S. process requires a sender to leave his own email application, go to the U.S.P.S. website, and compose a letter there. The U.S.P.S. then prints the document out, puts it in an envelope, applies postage and physically delivers it. Presently, a one-page letter produced in this fashion costs the sender 50 cents. While some may find this service attractive, it suffers in that the sender cannot use the convenience of his own mail box (i.e., his own email application) to mail the document. Second, this system is still mostly a physical, non-electronic process with all the limitations inherent in physical mail delivery. Third, the recipient cannot make use of his electronic mailbox (that is, his email application) to receive the document.
Today, the need for better email security—like the overload and nuisance email problems—is only met with partial solutions. Providers of secure email services focus only on secure email services. In addition, these partial services often involve cumbersome procedures including, for example, requiring senders to leave their email applications and log into the service provider's website.
It is therefore an object of this invention to provide a complete and commercially viable solution to all these email problems without impeding the nature of the Internet.